Pagan Mistaken for Jewess (No, Really!)

A SELF-PROFESSED druid priestess has said a Melbourne bar refused to let her in because of her age and the mistaken belief that she was Jewish.


Details:-

Morgan, 51, who uses only one name, has told the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal that crowd controllers at the Cushion Lounge in bayside St Kilda denied her entry when she went there about 1.30am on Monday, December 12 last year.

But the staff and the bar's manger claim a private function that night was the reason for refusing entry.

Former manager and part-owner Daniel Centofanti...denied his business was discriminatory, though its regular Saturday night crowd was young "trendsetters" in their 20s and 30s.

"One of my head promoters was Jewish, my bar staff and customers were a mix of male and female, homosexual, heterosexual, metrosexual," he told the tribunal.

Mr Centofanti said Morgan phoned him the day after the incident and told him she had "made a lot of money from venues like us".

Morgan denied this.

The St Kilda local said she went to the bar to retrieve her 15-year-old son, who was due home by midnight.

Security footage shows him leaving the bar sometime after midnight, then being refused re-entry and leaving again before his mother arrived.

Morgan said security staff stopped her from entering and allegedly asked, "Haven't you got an X-box or a vibrator at home to keep you happy?".

She said another guard told her "You're a Jew" after seeing her necklace displaying a wiccan star.

"I said to him, 'I'm a pagan, like your people'," she told the hearing.

"I assumed because he was an Islander he was a pagan," Morgan said.

The guard, Clay Auimatagi, told the hearing he would never make an insensitive religious comment but had asked whether the star was a Jewish symbol to defuse an argument between Morgan and another guard, Michael Almatrah.